Welcome back to the automation podcast. The world's
number one industrial automation product technology show thanks
to you,
our audience of highly skilled automation professionals. Thank
you for being a member of our audience,
and thank you for tuning back in this
week. Now for those new to the show,
my name is Sean Tierney from Insights and
Automation. And each week, I invite a new
person on the show to talk about products,
technologies, applications, and just all things automation.
And with that,
I wanna welcome Eric
from PlusOne Robotics.
When, they reached out to me, about having
you on, I'm like, this sounds really interesting.
So but before we get into
PlusOne Robotics and what manufacturers can do in
America to be more competitive,
let's learn a little bit about you and
who are you, and, you know, tell the
audience a little bit about yourself. Sean, I'm
really excited to be with you. This has
been a long time coming, and I'm happy
to, you know, share this podcast with you
today.
So I'm Eric Nieves, and I'm the founder
of PlusOne Robotics
in Texas.
And we focus on warehouse automation,
but, you know, I found your content compelling
because prior to PlusOne,
I spent twenty five years at Yaskawa.
Right? Yep.
And I was the head of r and
d at Yaskawa,
the technology director
for, you know, a number of years before
making the change to start my own company.
But,
you know, we've been directly responsible for thousands
upon thousands of robots in manufacturing
contexts.
Everything from, you know, high volume automotive to
small to medium
to,
you know, one off
robots
in microgravity,
all kinds of things.
And so, you know, an audience like yours
that represents just so many different facets of
automation,
we thought would be a fun time.
Yeah. And we have covered Jaskawa, Motoman
quite a bit along with all those other
companies that they're kinda in the same niche
as. And so that you were in r
and d, so you have that pedigree of,
knowing, like, what was going on in the
industry and what the competitors were doing and
how everybody was trying to one up each
other. And,
so there's so many great names in that
space. And now you've started plus for robotics.
And I think a lot of people think
of robotics. They're thinking of, you know, everything
from the simple pick and place machines that
put together to assembly
to,
the big ones that lift whole card bodies
so they can be, you know, welded together
to, you know, you know, a lot of
conveyor you know, putting things on and off
conveyors now, you know, a lot of palletizing
and depalletizing of robots on them, and even,
machine tending, which is something like you didn't
hear too much of before COVID. Right? But
machine tending
and, so but in warehousing,
you know, I'm looking at the robot behind
you. In warehouse, and a lot of time
I'm thinking about,
you know, AMRs, AGVs.
But, tell us a little bit about when
you started this company, like, what was your
goal with it? What are you what are
you trying to do that's new, different, exciting,
and, you know, solves challenges that people face
today?
Yeah. Well, it kinda comes back to when
I was still at Yaskawa.
Mhmm.
You know, we had all kinds of people
reaching out to us to try to help
them with their problems,
and, you know,
increasingly,
more and more of them outside of manufacturing.
Yep.
And,
you know, I had one in particular that's
a a big parcel courier
come to us and say, hey. We really
need help unloading
trucks.
Oh.
Can you, you know, have robots
do that for us? And I told them,
guys, you don't have a robot problem.
You have a perception and grasping problem.
Right? The robot's not your issue. You could
just get any robot, but you don't yeah.
Everything you do is variable.
Nothing you do is repetitive.
Yeah. So you need to perceive and understand
the scene
and then still be able to interact with
this package, which is gonna be different than
the last package, which is gonna be different
from the next package. Yeah. Oh, you know,
you don't have a robot problem, and I
would send them along their way.
Well, you know, you do this for three
or four years to more and more of
these people, you wake up one day and
go, wait a minute.
Yep.
We should just go do this.
And,
I was fortunate because
my cofounder,
Sean Edwards, was working on that very problem,
computer vision for cluttered seats.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so, you know, we said, hey, we
bring,
you know, the sort of engineering
and chops
of high end,
you know, AI enabled computer vision
to industrial robots, we actually are gonna be
able to say yes to some of these
opportunities instead of no.
And that sort of was the genesis of
PlusOne
Robotics.
Right?
And it fundamentally
differs from manufacturing
because of this notion of repeatability
versus variability.
Mhmm. Right? You know, in my manufacturing
days,
everything
was,
I need to do the same thing the
same way for the next however many thousand
cycles.
And your value was in your ability to
repeat
precisely.
Right? Yep. But in the supply chain world,
you don't have repeatability
at all.
Everything that comes down the line is different.
And
so you end up with
variability
being the driver of value, not repeatability.
And variability
requires sensing.
So if you're gonna do anything meaningful in
the supply chain space, the first thing you
gotta do is give it eyes.
And those eyes are obviously,
you know, cameras, three d sensors, time of
flight. There's a lot of different sort of
technologies for image
Mhmm. But you then need to
it's not enough just to get data. You
then have to understand what is this scene
telling me,
and how do I then command the robot
to do something valuable,
how to pick the next package.
And that's really where our,
sweet spot was, was in writing that software
layer that took standard camera images
and turned them into robot action.
If you or somebody you know needs training
on CompactLogix,
ControlLogix,
or really virtually any Allen Bradley programmable controller
released over the last, say, forty years, then
I wanna share with you what I'm working
on right now for release in early twenty
twenty six. And, you know, if you've been
following me, you probably know I release a
new course every year. But for 2026,
I decided that I was gonna refilm all
of my Allen Bradley PLC courses and release
two new courses on the legacy PLC five
and slick 500. And this all came about
as I'm here in my physical training room
in the Berkshires
working on new labs for 2026 for the
in person courses. I'm like, this is the
perfect time to update all my Allen Bradley
online courses.
So if you are already enrolled in one
of my level one and two or what
I call my extended courses,
just know that you're gonna get these new
courses completely free of charge. And if you
ever bought a mega bundle or ultimate bundle,
that's what comes in those courses on the
extended edition. So you're gonna get the new
courses completely free. And if you're a new
student
who comes in and buy the new course,
you're gonna get the old one as well.
And I'm doing this for those people who
maybe they're servicing old control logic systems with
control net, and they're using, like, version 20
of the software. Well, it looks a lot
different and operates a lot different than what
version 31 and above does. Right? So in
any case, I do wanna share that with
you. And, again, if you know anybody looking
for either in person training or online training,
please send them my way. And with that,
let me get you right back into this
week's episode
of the automation podcast.
Yeah. You know, it's you think of a
depalletizer. It's the same thing that depalletizing.
Well, maybe a little variation that can be
built in, but you maybe have two or
three different types of products on pallets. And
the depalletizer, that's all I have to know
about. But with a truck,
the orders come in different.
We're ordering different stuff every day. Not many
of us order the same mix all the
time. And then you times that by, you
know, 10,000 people that may have orders in
a couple of trucks.
Those packets, they're all different sizes, all different
shapes.
And Yeah. To be able to automate the
the
deep deep
trailering
of all those boxes. Right? Yeah. I see
exactly where you need the perception.
You need to understand the space, be able
to detect all the individual packages and boxes,
and then be able to accurately pick them
up, orientate some, pick them up, and put
them on a conveyor.
So vision Yeah. I wanna go back to
what you were saying on depalletizing
because
you are right.
It used to be that pallets came in
and they were homogeneous. Yeah. They would all
be the same,
box or case on them, and so the
robot could be blind. All it needed to
know was the pattern. Yeah. They could repeat
that pattern, and usually there were two patterns.
Right? Because each layer Literally. Was interlocked. Yep.
But the robot effectively didn't need any smarts.
Mhmm. It just needed to remember.
But
as you and I, our buying habits have
continued to change Mhmm. It means that what
goes to the stores anymore or the DCs
is not a whole pallet of the same
thing. No. You now have more and more
pallets are moving to mixed product. Yeah.
Right? So,
all of a sudden, that same robot that
was so successful at depalletizing
homogeneous skews
cannot tolerate mixed skews.
Mhmm. And so our vision system found a
role to play
in mixed depalletizing.
And today, we're probably the largest supplier of
mixed depalletizing
robots in the country Right.
Because our technology
unlocked what was already
an existing application, but had been limited. Yeah.
Right? Yep. So, yes, the ultimate expression of
variability
to your point is you pull up a
truck and you open and you go, oh
my god.
What is all that?
And so,
you know, the truck is sort of the
last step on the development platform for automated
unload.
It's a exceedingly difficult problem
because
of everything we've talked about. Plus now it
needs to be a mobile system to drive
into a 53 foot van,
and you now are having to bring your
lighting with you. Right?
Remember Sean, this is all computer vision. Yeah.
And computer vision
is, you know,
dependent on lighting being Very much better. Consistent.
Yep. Right? So,
we do have, you know, some of our
colleagues at, other companies in the warehouse automation
space that are focusing specifically
on the truck problem.
And, what we have found is there are
so many other problems within the warehouse
that also require
computer vision for variability
Mhmm. With grasping.
We've done you know, we spent a lot
more time within inside the four walls of
the warehouse rather than at the dock. Mhmm.
Mhmm. Yeah. And tell us some of the
applications that you guys, you know, do on
a regular basis where you're solving an application
that's a pain point for either warehouse or
manufacturer.
You know, not that you know, I don't
need to know the specific, you know, product,
but what type of applications
are we talking about?
I mean, a lot of our work is
in
loading sorting machines.
Okay. So
if you are a overnight parcel courier Mhmm.
You bring in all of the shipments that
you have gathered for the day and
you,
you know, bring them to a central network,
those hubs
have, you know,
miles of conveyor.
And all of that all of those parcels
end up being aggregated
into this big river
of packages.
And ultimately, they need to be sorted by
ZIP code or by region so they'd make
their way to you. Yep. And it might
have to be sorted
multiple times before it's granular enough to get
on that outbound truck. Mhmm. Right?
But,
so there are
high speed loop sorters
that that's what they do. They scan your
package and dump it off into the appropriate
destination.
But loading those sorting machines
has traditionally been manual,
and that is an intense application because you
got a lot of volume over a short
window of time, right, that needs to be
processed.
And so plus one sort of reed the
market in
what's called singulation or parcel induction
onto the sorting machines.
And so you can picture
this big flood
of,
packages and they come in a slug
and it stops in front of the robot.
The robot sees, you know, fifty, sixty packages
at one time in a big, you know,
sort of,
jumble,
the cameras look at that and say, here's
the next one you should go get and
here's the one that you should go get.
Sometimes we have one robot, sometimes we have
multiple robots
working in these in the area
to get the packages out. And
the the whole point is to put them
on the outbound side
one at a time. That's why the process
is called singulation
because you gotta go from bulk flow, which
is your inbound, to simulated flow for the
outbound.
And people do that, you know, very adeptly
because we have
eyes with stereo vision and very quick,
you know, decision making, and we have two
hands.
Right?
But
it's not a job people enjoy.
You can imagine.
You have to do that, you know, 28,
30 times a minute for the next four,
six, eight hours.
It's just not much fun.
So automation plays that role now increasingly.
So that's probably the banner. When I say
we do a billion picks a day or
a million picks total and we do over
a million picks a day, the bulk of
them are gonna be loading a sorting machine
somewhere in the world between North America and
Europe.
Is there this is just curiosity. Is there
any orientation concerns for the label?
Like, so you're picking typically, there's one label
on a six sided or, you know, box.
Right? Is there any Right. Does that come
into play with the with the It absolutely
does because you have to in order to
sort it, you gotta scan it.
Right?
So, that barcode tells us a lot of
information. It doesn't tell us the information. We
don't pay any attention to the barcode, but
we're responsible for ensuring that the system can
read it downstream.
Okay. Now
in some applications,
this is easy
because they'll have a six sided tunnel
downstream. Okay. Yep. And if that's the case,
then orientation
from us doesn't Doesn't matter. Yeah.
But if they have a five sided or
a four sided,
tunnel, then it does.
And we'll have to ensure that the label
is face up. Okay.
We do that, but you can imagine, Sean,
that comes at a cycle time penalty. Oh,
yeah.
Right? Because I may have to handle it
twice to be able to get it in
the right orientation.
So,
for lower volume applications,
that is still an option. For high volume,
they're always gonna invest in the six sided
tunnel because they really want right out the
back door. Got it. Got it. That makes
a lot of sense now. Yeah. I was
wondering about that because you gotta scan it.
You gotta scan it. You know, we were
talking in the preshow
about,
you know, practical steps small and midside manufacturers
can take,
to adopt automation.
And so I wanted to get your take
on that, you know, as it as it
relates to your experience and your company.
Yeah. So this has less to do with
plus one per se and more to do
with my work with the a three.
So
the Association for Advancing Automation,
I sit on the board of the a
three. I've been involved for many, many years.
And,
as you know, we're the leading trade association
for driving robotics,
into industry.
And,
you know, Detroit does not have a problem.
Detroit knows how to use robots.
Right? Automotive
is set,
but the rest of industry,
especially the small to medium manufacturers,
really struggle
even today.
And that's why I wanted to spend a
little bit of time, you know, talking to,
you know, the audience about, you know, kind
of what I've seen.
And
when I talk to,
you know, some entrepreneur or plant owner or
manager, generally, it was a,
successful engineer at a company that then decided
to go off on their own because they
saw an opportunity. Right? Sure. And it might
be a shop with 12, you know, people.
It may be bigger than that, but they're
not gonna be very large.
And
it always comes down to three fundamental questions
that they ask when they go to make
any investment
in automation or capital equipment, not just robots,
but NC machines,
printers,
you know, it's all the same thing. First
question is, can I afford it?
Right?
Can I afford it? Is this thing out
of reach for me?
And I think you would agree
that over the, you know, twenty, thirty years
that we've been doing this, the price of
this technology has continued to drop. Oh, yeah.
And we definitely see that in the robot
space with the introduction of cobots, collaborative robots.
Yep. Right? They sort of
lowered the floor threshold
for bringing automation
in.
So
more and more
often, the first question is answered to their
satisfaction.
Can I afford it? Hey. Actually, I can.
Mhmm. The second question they ask is, can
I keep it running?
Meaning,
do I have the stat,
the wherewithal
to program
and maintain
this robot and operate it?
And that's a workforce development question.
Because
if they do have the folks, then great.
But often they don't.
You know, when you bring a robot in
to a typical small manufacturer, it is generally
the very first robot they've ever had. Mhmm.
Yep. Right?
And so
they need
some amount of
you know, they gotta they gotta think about
the staff.
And so what are you gonna do? You're
either gonna go higher or you're going to
up skill. Mhmm. Right?
And that's why I say this is a
workforce development question. Sure. Yeah.
I am bullish
that the answer
to question two, can I keep it running,
is also increasingly yes? And and I'll tell
you why I I I'm confident.
One,
robotics has sort of become the defacto way
that we teach engineering now at the secondary
and college level.
Right?
There's plenty of,
everything from vocational schools,
continuing education,
four year
engineering
programs for manufacturing
technology.
There are ways now to get
young
engineers
that have seen robots before they got to
your door. Mhmm. Right?
I mean, I think all of us owe
a great threat of gratitude to Dean Kamen
and the whole first robotics
thing
because it has primed
the pump
for
robotics
help.
Yeah.
Right? For sure. So, you know, the question
of can I keep it running,
I think
we're all gonna be okay? The other part
of can I keep it running is, hey?
Maybe I don't have
robotics program within an hour and a half
of me. I've got my people.
Well, upscale is now
a very viable option for your people
because
there is so much
state,
federal, and municipal support for retraining on high-tech,
that you're probably not gonna have to pay
for it.
Somebody is gonna foot that bill for you.
You're gonna have to invest their time
to get them up the curve,
but you can get that. Yeah. So can
I can I keep it running? I think
you can keep it running. If you or
somebody you know needs hands on training with
Rockwell or Siemens PLCs, I want you to
consider the automation school.
Not only are you gonna find that we're
less expensive than sending your people to the
factory, we're gonna be able to cover more
content quicker,
and we can even teach your students on
both Rockwell and Siemens if you wanna do
a multi day engagement.
Now you'll find all the information about my
hands on training over at theautomationschool.com
forward /live.
And if you have any questions, I wanna
encourage you to reach out to me. But
just keep in mind that what we can
do here is typically more than you'll find
other places because we have more equipment. You
know, anybody could put APLCs in a room,
put APCs in a room, and say, here
you go. Here's a lab book. What we
can do is share, well, my thirty five
years experience using this stuff, but, also, I
have dozens of products from third parties we
can bring in and integrate in addition to
all the vendors I have shown you on
the YouTube channel and on the automation blog
over the years. So, again, if you want
to do hands on training affordably
and you need quality instructor, please consider sending
your students to me. And, for all the
information and to get in contact with me,
please visit the automationschool.com
forward slash live. And with that, let's go
back to this week's episode of the automation
podcast.
Yeah. And it's it's funny you mentioned Dean.
I was I was invited in to do
some training a few weeks ago for those
guys,
and,
I don't usually take this equipment on the
road. But some for some people, you you
you'll make a you'll make a trip.
You know what? You bring up a really
good point. And as a, any any of
the listeners out there, you know, you've heard
me talk about how I was a first
robotics coach for a few years, and it
is definitely
a great
system. You know, at first, being a PLC
HMI guy, I was kinda like,
but, no, it is great that the way
everything's touchpad driven. My grandkids and my oldest
grandchild is 17. She doesn't know a time
before touchscreens.
Right? I remember when I got in this
business in the nineties, nobody knew what a
touchscreen was. Right? It was like Yeah. You
know, when I talk to people, it'd be
like, what's a touchscreen?
I'm like, Die Hard. Didn't you ever see
Die Hard? Anyways but, you know, the the
thing is and and I'm glad you brought
up a three. We've covered them quite a
bit on the news over the years.
And, I I you know, if you guys
are in manufacturing, check them out.
Really, anybody in automation should be checking them
out Yeah. And and and like organizations.
But,
you know, that I think that's why so
many integrators twenty to thirty years ago started
putting on
robotic
arms
because they knew they had these brilliant people
who could automate your entire facility, and they
saw that robots were more than just these
things that picked up car bodies so you
could weld them. They were actually being used
more and more in everyday
in everyday manufacturing
and automation applications. And today, you'd be hard
pressed not to find to find an integrator
of any size that doesn't do some robotics.
And
and so those people in in the manufacturing,
if you're already programming the PLCs and HMIs
and doing the sensors and the calibration,
you shouldn't be afraid of
robotics because it's yes. It's another language. Right?
It's like it's like going from PLC to
HMI or from Yeah. Look. You know, bar
codes to vision.
Yeah. But it's in your It's eleven thirty
one complete. It's it's You can program a
robot. Yep. Alright.
But,
you know, I said there were three elements,
and we've talked about the first two. Right?
Can I afford it? Yes. Can I keep
it running?
Yes. The third one is the tricky one.
Can I keep it busy?
Right? Yeah. Can I keep it busy? There's
a difference between can I keep it running,
which is, you know, is it broken or
not,
and can I keep it busy?
Busy is about
the difference between
high volume manufacturing
and low volume manufacturing.
In,
robots
it it undeniable.
Robots are most successful
when it is high mix
or high volume, low mix manufacturing.
Right? There are only
five or six,
you know, sort of variants of the car
body going down the line. You know how
to spot weld all six of them.
You're gonna be busy all day. Yep. But
when you get down to small to medium
manufacturers,
you know, a thousand might be a big
lot size.
Yeah. Right?
You have
lower volumes but higher mix.
And there's a spectrum here, obviously.
But the
the further you are on the mix is
high, but volume is low,
part of that curve
is where
the robots
now
either the robot has to
program itself,
right,
or it just doesn't require any programming.
Because
where the manufacturer
stub their toe today is, hey.
By the time I picked up the teach
pendant
and I programmed
the robot for that next part,
I coulda welded them by hand and been
done with it.
Yep.
That's really the main issue left.
Mhmm. So
if
you can
automate that process,
and now we're talking about sim to real.
Mhmm. Right? Digital twin. Yep.
Or
it's sensor driven,
and it just sees the part and knows
what to do with it based on some
constraints.
So,
question three
is a work in process.
It is a work in progress, I'll say,
because
definitely
the ease of programming robots has got to
the place now where
more
higher mix, lower volume
manufacturers
can make that leap, but not all of
them today.
Not all of them. The closer you are
to a one off fabricator,
the less the robot makes sense.
That's true.
So,
but
I see so much activity
these days
with
AI
and
automated learning
that I think we're going to get more
and more coverage
of that spectrum
so that robots can, you know, be an
effective tool for these smaller manufacturers.
Yeah. Yeah. I I agree with you. And
and, you know, repeatability
in some in some areas,
doing something identically every time is very important.
But in other areas, like taking a box
out of a pile and putting it on
a conveyor, you don't have to be within
microns where you put it. No. It just
has to be on the conveyor. So every
application, you know, has its own challenges. In
some places,
the last thing you wanna do is build
a lot of things for stock. Maybe you're
doing a finishing product on on a product,
and it needs to be
exact in you know, there's a lot of
money in this product up into this point,
and this finishing process has to be perfect.
And so it's not about volume. It's about
making sure that last step because if you're
like, we like, I worked with a company
that did lenses. And at the last the
last part of the lens process was the
coating, and you don't wanna mess up there
because a lot of time grinding those specialty
lenses was done for the military and for
different applications was done up front. Yeah. And
you do it all away. Yeah. This little
coating, you gotta get that part right because
if that's not right,
that and the coating's not worth that much
compared to the lens at that point. So,
yeah, a lot of different ways to approach
it and think about it. What other thoughts
do you have about, you know, closing a
gap? I know in our in the preshow,
we talked a lot about American
competitiveness,
and,
I think this kinda dovetails right into that.
Can you share your thoughts on that?
Yeah. Look. I'm,
I'm a believer
that,
you know, when you shine a very harsh
light, you're gonna see the shadows.
And,
harsh lights cast severe shadows, and I think
that's what happened during COVID.
We shone
such a bright light on our own ability
to,
you know, take care of ourselves
Yep. That we said, you know what? Something's
gotta change here.
And so I am a big proponent
of reshoring
some of the things that we should just
be able to know we always have at
our disposal Mhmm. Or can spool up manufacturing
of very quickly.
We should have always been able to just
turn on this turn up the
mask knob,
turn up the ventilator knob, and we couldn't.
Yep. We couldn't because we just it did
it wasn't here anymore.
So as we think about bringing back in
to North America,
more of the manufacturing
of those critical goods,
then, you know,
automation's gonna have a role to play.
And,
we're here for it. Right? We wanna see
we never wanna kind find ourselves in a
situation where we can't make for the ourselves
the things that we need. Yeah. So let's
do that first. Whatever you whatever you think
about on tariffs
and,
you know, near shoring or any of that,
Set that all to the side. We can
all agree
there were things we wish we had made
and we didn't. Yeah.
But let's focus on that. And that's what
I mean when I say,
American competitiveness.
First, it's
American
resilience.
Let's let's make sure we take care of
our own house
and anything that we might need, we have
ready access to.
And we're gonna start exercising some muscles, Sean,
that have been flaccid for so long that,
you know, they've just atrophied,
and we need that back. You know, we
see that happening today
with chip fabs.
Yeah. We're investing very, very heavily in chip
fabs, which means a lot of the other
sort of supporting
processes
we're having to relearn.
Right?
It's going to be the same thing as
we start,
bringing back more and more of these, you
know, manufacturing of these goods here in The
States. We're gonna have to remember,
you know, materials
and process flow and tool making
and all of the other things associated with
it, and that
lends itself to continuing to grow the footprint.
So,
I'm not one that says,
we need to start building everything,
you know, in America. We should be completely
self sufficient. You know? I'm not an isolationist.
What I am is
sometimes bad things happen. You better be ready.
Let's do that first. And as a result,
you will automatically
and naturally,
organically
continue to grow your ability for manufacturing,
period. And that's a good thing. Yeah. And
I I wanna you know what? The majority
of our audience is in America. Right? But
we do have a number of people in
Canada, UK,
even Mexico and India. And and so the
way I've always said this was and and
my friend, Jad Garner, talks about this a
lot.
Manufacture
local.
So we want the manufacturing in this country
to be great, to be able to provide
all our needs. Mhmm.
I also want
the manufacturing in The UK to be able
to make everything they need. I want the
manufacturing in India to make everything they need.
Canada, Mexico. Yeah. I want you every every
lodge. Sometimes you it's impractical that especially the
smaller country, they're not gonna be able to
make everything, but they can make most of
their own stuff. And so
this this trying to shift all your manufacturing
to one place to make your
corporate profits go through the roof,
we understand why people did that. But on
the same token, we've all heard the stories
of these third world countries that had thriving
industries, like one is is soda pop.
Some third world countries had a a a
vibrant drink industries. They canned their own drinks.
They made their own drinks. It was all
local flavors, nothing you and I would recognize.
But then some corporate guy gets in and
slides somebody some greenbacks, and before you know
it, they're dumping in, you know, brand x
or brand y. It devastates
the local industry, and all those people become
unemployed, and those local brands are going forever.
And those are the type of things, whether
it's happening to us or happening to another
country, those are the things we need to
avoid. Let's all be stronger by manufacturing
Yeah. The products near where the people who
are using them are. Right? So so your
your your cars are made in your country,
and and we've seen a lot of car
dealers car manufacturers do that where they have
manufacturing
in Europe, in The US, and Asia, and
and other places. So,
yeah, we we
you know, at some point,
you know, saving 10¢ on a mask is
not worth having it having to wait for
it to come on a boat. Right? It's
just not to be there. Not to me,
the consumer. So I'm with you there, and,
you know, totally agree totally agree on that.
And, you know, I want so for you
guys listening,
let us know what you think. Oh, did
you feel the same, or do you think
totally different? That's the fun of the comment
section. So whether you're on the blog or
on YouTube or on iTunes or Spotify or
wherever we are,
please put your comments. I know most of
you are driving right now, so you can't
really comment. Right. Don't do that. Yeah. Feel
free to contact me and email me or
or comment. I love to hear your comments.
I always do. And, but with that, though,
I do wanna turn it back with to
you because, Eric, to see I'm looking just
looking at the list of things we're gonna
talk about. I wanna see what's anything else
we want to cover during this episode?
Well, before we get off of that subject,
I did want to,
you know, talk about
robotics
is effectively the end of labor arbitrage.
Right?
You you mentioned,
hey. People are moving from
this developing nation
to another developing nation,
right, because they're either
incentivized
on tax Mhmm.
Or labor. Mhmm. Right? All you need to
know about, you know, sort of the growth
of,
the Chinese middle class
is how much,
manufacturing moved from China to Vietnam.
Right? Yeah.
It's it's indicative
that China is continuing to grow. There's less
labor arbitrage in the coastal cities of China,
so it all goes to Southeast Asia.
But labor arbitrage
ends
where automation
begins.
Right?
Once it's robots here and robots there,
then the economic
incentive
to build it over there because it's just
a lower cost basis
is done.
And then the manufacturers
can be more responsive
to the local market.
Yeah.
If all manufacturing
cost me the same, well then, you know
what? I'm going to build
in, you know, Midwest US for Midwest consumption,
which might be different than West Coast consumption.
Yep. Right? Even though, you know, previously, those
would have been two different cost bases.
Mhmm. Now
automation has leveled the playing field. Do not
underestimate the value of leveling the playing field
here,
and, you know, I'd love to hear your
users comments on that.
Right? Yeah. And, you know, I've worked with
a lot of companies who manufacture locally,
and what the reason that they they're not
they don't compete with those high volume, like,
mass produced, you know, a million of the
same part because they do custom parts.
So it could be custom drapes or custom
mini blinds or custom things for your home
or your car.
But because they're local, they can turn it
around in a day or two and have
it to you. Whereas if you want the
farther go you the farther way you go
for that custom pot, the longer it's gonna
take to get to you. And especially the
heavier it is as well. Right? So or
if it's empty, like like cans. Right? So
people don't know this. Right? Mattresses and cans,
and most of them are made in your
city
because they're full of air, and it's not
very affordable to ship it very far. So
that's why you have a mattress,
manufacturer in in near every metropolitan area as
well as,
cans. Canning. If you know anything about canning
and, you know, the cans you drink your
soft drinks in. Right? Those are most of
those are made very close, and they read
they don't like shipping them even when they're
shut falls because it's a it's a truck
full of air. Right? It's not Right. Before
it's made into a can, it's very efficient
to ship that aluminum.
After it's made into a can, not so
much anymore. So Yeah. There's a lot of
carbon per ounce of aluminum.
Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. It's a lot of it's a
lot of, expense on a truck. You know,
these trucks Yeah. And trains, the the the
heavier they are, the more the more efficient
they are. Right? And, but, no, when you
get those things full of the air, that's
not so so much the the the truth.
You know, that's a very good point. How
about on any other topics did you wanna,
talk about? Well, you know, you talk about
shipping air.
That's something that, obviously, in our market, people
spend a lot of time thinking about. Oh,
yeah. Right? Yeah. In the warehouse automation space,
if you're a distribution center or you're a,
you know, ecommerce brand and you're having to
do final mile or whatever,
it's all about,
fill ratio.
Right? How full can I make this, whatever
it is Yep? This tote,
this, you know, container,
this truck,
this cargo ship.
It's all the same thing. How full can
I get it? Because any time that we're
shipping air is wasted expense. Yeah. Yeah.
And that represents a different set of challenges
to folks in the automation space
because, you know, the applications that we talked
about,
depalletizing,
singulation,
you know, even truck unload,
we're gonna classify those, Sean, as subtractive
applications.
Mhmm. I start with bulk and I take
them down.
Yeah. Right?
When you are dealing with the outbound side
where fill ratio matters,
those are now
additive
applications. Mhmm. I'm building
a pallet and want it to be as
full as possible.
I am loading
a shipping container, and I need it to
have a little air as possible. I need
it to be full.
So in these additive problems,
you now have the complexity
of
you're now playing,
you know, Tetris in three d Yeah. With
variable inputs.
Yeah. Right?
And so,
the challenge is and if you've ever watched
somebody
load, you know, like an air container at
the airport Yeah. With luggage,
you know, they're making
thousands of decisions.
Yes. Right? Because what's coming to them just
comes as it comes, and they have to
pick this up and go, does this have
a good spot right now? If it does,
I'm shoving it in there. Yep. But they
may go,
this does not have a good spot for
the holes I'm looking at right now. I
gotta set this off to the side for
a minute. Yeah. Oh, but this one does,
especially if I combine it with this other
one on top. Let me shove these two
in. Yeah. Right? It's a really difficult problem.
And add to that the complexity
of crushability.
It might be the right size,
but it's too light, and I can't set
the heavier stuff on top of it. Yeah.
Depleted.
So computationally,
it could be hard m p.
Right? It's a very difficult problem. So,
automated
filling is difficult
at the end of the day. Yeah. So
you're going to have to,
either sacrifice on fill ratio because, hey. I
got rid of the labor
or that I couldn't find anyway.
But I was able to get the stuff
out the door
and, you know, we met quality specs.
The automation made fewer mistakes and sort of
how stacking was. You know, we had fewer
instances of damage.
All those would have to outweigh sort of
the loss of fill that you get. Yeah.
Or
you're going to have to have it be
that the automation took you this far,
and then the people came in and did
the rest. Mhmm. Mhmm. Right?
And this notion of robot human teams
Mhmm. Is really where I think this is
all gonna end up.
Right? I think it's too hard a problem
to try to get to a 100%
automation
in these applications.
And that's why the company is called, I
gotta go that way, PlusOne Robotics.
Right? Because that's my whole view of this
market is
when you're when variability
is the rule,
not repeatability, but variability,
AI is going to get to a point
where as good as it is, it's never
quite good enough.
But, boy, the people are really smart.
The people are clever. The people make better
judgments.
And so
team
your robots
with a human being. The human being is
the plus one,
and it's the reason that the entire system
works better.
Right?
Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's a people
business. And it's funny. We used to have
somebody who'd say that it's a people business
talking about a one particular business, but when
it when it comes down to it, it's
like, we you and I don't go to
work so the trees in the forest grow
better or, you know, so the cows you
know, or for the fish in the sea.
Everything we do, virtually everything every human being
does is for society.
It's whether you're going to work to clean
the street or you're going to work to
pass a lawyer.
I mean, it's it's a people all businesses
really are people businesses. It's all about people,
whether it's feeding them, clothing them, entertaining them,
and helping them get better. And and so
always I always agree that I wanna have
people in the mix. I wanna have people
be the focus. It's not about lights out
factories.
Granted, if you had a system that you
were able to design that can do that,
that's fine. But, you know, there's a there's
a reason.
People need jobs.
People also wanna help other people. So, you
know, try you know, spending, you know, that
lag going that last mile, spending the extra,
you know, 50% to go that last mile
to me, you know, keep people involved. Keep
people in in the loop. And, you know,
we all know we don't want we don't
want robots talking to us on the phone.
We want a live human being who can
talk our language and is nice.
And Yes. But that's the same that's the
same in business too. You know? It's true.
Yeah. So that's that's how I So Yeah.
We you know,
if your audience
you know, if you follow plus one on
LinkedIn, we have a very active presence on
LinkedIn. You'll often find our hashtag there.
Hashtag robots work people rule.
Right? Right. Because that's that's the right relationship.
We want robots.
We want them to do things we care
not to do.
Absolutely. And so you want the robots to
do that, but the people are still in
charge.
The people are the ones making the determination
what that robot will and won't do. They're
the ones programming it. They're the ones, you
know, maintaining it. All of that happens,
for the people. And to your point, it's
people ultimately that reap the benefits.
Yeah. Guys? Yes. And so, you know, robots
work, people rule is,
you know, the way we
always frame it up here at plus one.
Yeah. So, guys, check out their LinkedIn. I
know most of you are on LinkedIn. Of
course, you can always connect with me, connect
with insights and automation and the automation school,
roll up on LinkedIn. But please, check out
PlusOne Robotics. I really enjoyed sitting down with
Eric and talking about all these. These are
these are topics we're we're talk we're kinda
zooming out here. We're talking about applications more
than actually the bits and bites, but I
hope you guys enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.
Eric, I I don't know. Is there any
closing thoughts? Anything else you wanna cover before
we close out the show?
No. Just, I wanted to thank you for
having me on, and,
you know, always happy to keep this conversation
going because I think it's an important one.
Yeah. We'd like to get you back on.
We'd love to have somebody,
from a three on to talk about just
their mission because we have covered them on
the new show many, many times. But, you
know, it's always better to hear from, you
know, like, when we hear directly from the
PROFINET guys or we hear directly from the
IO Link guys. It's good to hear
right from a three to hear what's going
on. I don't know if you have a
colleague who who can come on. We'd love
to get them on because they're doing an
important thing. And there's other organizations, like, we
have ISA on on a actually, we got
a an episode coming up with ISA that's
already been recorded. But,
in any case, Eric, I wanna thank you
for coming on. Love to get you back
on maybe in the six months to talk
about what's new and exciting and maybe some
things we didn't cover today, but just really
wanna appreciate you coming on the show today.
Thank you, Sean. It was a great, time
to be together. Well, I hope you guys
enjoyed that episode, and I wanna thank you
all for tuning back in. I also wanna
thank our members. Really appreciate you guys. You
know, we're a very small niche. In industrial
automation, there's a total audience of probably 80,000
people.
And, so I really appreciate,
all of you, all of the audience, and
especially our members who go the extra mile
to donate $5.10, or $25 a month towards
the channel to keep us going. I really
appreciate you guys. We don't have thousands of
members, but I do appreciate all the ones
we do have. With that said, I do
have a programming note. We do have one
more episode coming out this year. That's gonna
be next week, and I interview a, big
player at one of the automation companies we've
talked about many times over the years.
And, so I think you guys will enjoy
that. And then there's gonna be a gap
of two to three weeks. We we already
have,
episodes for next year film, and we have,
new ones being recorded.
But, I'm gonna be traveling for the holidays
and some other things going on, so we
will have a gap. Probably be back the
January.
So with that said, I wanna recommend check
out my other show, the History of Automation
show and podcast.
It's not on any audio platforms yet, but
you can get it at the automationblog.com,
on YouTube, and on LinkedIn.
In next week's episode, we actually interviewed
one of the people on the engineering team
that developed the Modicon o 84. That's right.
This is the guy who actually developed the
firmware,
you know, so you could program it in
ladder logic. And it's just so interesting. So
if you're looking for something to listen to,
over that, the course of the holidays when
I'm not back on here with the podcast,
check out the history of automation. You'll find
it on the automation blog,
YouTube, and on LinkedIn.
And someday when we raise enough money to
actually launch the nonprofit, we'll probably do audio
as well. I'm I've been looking into that
as well, trying to find a service that
I could move to that will let me
do that one for free while, I do
these others for business. But in any case,
I do wanna wish you all good health
and happiness. Please enjoy your holiday season. And,
don't forget, we do have one more episode
coming out next week. And with that, until
next time, my friends.
Peace.